Monthly Archives: February 2013

Distinction is pretty dense, and it’s based on empirical sociological research done in France, so its methodologies are not immediately applicable to my work on sensation literature. For this reason, I’m not going to write about it in a whole lot of depth right now–I may come back to it after my exam. However, its conclusions and theories are immensely useful to studies of popular culture, so I’m going to reflect on some of the things that initially stood out to me.

Why to people like what they like? What is taste? How is it formed? These are Bourdieu’s main areas of interest in this study. Bourdieu surveys a whole bunch of people from all over France’s socioeconomic spectrum, and because he’s Bourdieu, he finds that–surprise surprise!–social class tends to determine an individual’s taste. Of course, class-based distinctions get reinforced in everyday life, so that social reproduction occurs seamlessly and ideologically. There is definitely such a thing as “working-class” taste for Bourdieu, but the difference for working-class folks is that their sense of taste is subordinate, so their likes and dislikes are constantly getting defined according to dominant classes’ aesthetic preferences: “the working-class ‘aesthetic’ is a dominated ‘aesthetic’ which is constantly obliged to define itself in terms of the dominant aesthetics” (41).

Aesthetic choices, for Bourdieu, create “class fractions” and actively distance people in one class from those in another. People internalize their class-based aesthetic preferences at a very young age, and these preferences end up filtering them into the “appropriate” class-affiliation so that the social status quo can be upheld. This is a great theoretical context for a lot of the Victorian responses to sensation fiction and sensation theater–I’m thinking specifically of the reviews of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s work that accuse her of merging the “literature of the kitchen” with the “literature of the drawing-room.” When a person encounters aesthetic products from another social class, Bourdieu finds, this person often reacts with disgust or horror–much like many (middle-class) reviewers reacted to sensation fiction.

Because this amorphous concept of “taste” is internalized so early and so rigorously, it’s incredibly hard to change, so “taste” is part of the equation of social mobility that makes “climbing the social ladder,” as it were, incredibly difficult. If you were raised on Budweiser, it’s going to be difficult for you to acclimate to home-brewed artisan beer, for example. If you were raised on McDonald’s and Taco Bell, molecular gastronomy is going to be a hard pill to swallow. If hanging out in your garage, tinkering with the car you bought for $2000 and drinking Budweiser is your idea of a perfect Sunday afternoon, wine-tasting in Napa, followed by light conversation at an organic, local-ingredient juice bar may seem insufferably boring. Okay, enough of the examples.

The point here is that one of these taste-categories has cultural capital, and the other doesn’t. The artisan-beer-drinking, molecular gastronomy-loving, wine-tasting, locally-grown-organic-food-eating, Jane Eyre-reading middle-to-upper class person has access to cultural capital, while the car-fixing, Budweiser-drinking lower-class individual (who doesn’t even get as many compound-adjective descriptors in my characterization here) has less of a taste for the products of cultural capital. However, since the aesthetic preferences of the dominant class tend to, well, dominate those of the lower classes, the Budweiser-drinking person might feel pressured to approximate a “taste” for artisan beer, for fear of appearing vulgar or tasteless. My summary so far has been an odd and socially stereotypical one–and is a bit disjointed from my own experience, suggesting that Bourdieu’s critique may be a bit dated in some ways. I think a lot of this still holds true, but I also think that marketing plays an enormous role in this equation–Budweiser could be marketed in such a way that it could attain the same cache as home-brewed artisan beer (if the marketing campaign was successful enough). And currently, I think that targeted marketing practices have unearthed niche markets that don’t necessarily feel a whole lot of pressure to conform to a standardized version of “upper-class” taste. Or, perhaps a better characterization would be that, currently, standardized versions of “upper-class” taste are based on the eccentricities of niche markets–hence the appeal of the hipster figure? I don’t know–Bourdieu probably talks about all of this in places of Distinction that my skimming didn’t quite reach.

Anyway, I’m interested in the habitus and the definition of taste. So, here’s some definitions:

TASTE:

“the propensity and capacity to appropriate (materially or symbolically) a given class of classified, classifying objects or practices” (169)

“the generative formula of life-style, a unitary set of distinctive preferences which express the same expressive intention in the specific logic of each of the symbolic sub-spaces, furniture, clothing, language or body hexis” (169)

“the practical operator of the transmutation of things into distinct and distinctive signs, of continuous distributions into discontinuous oppositions; it raises the differences inscribed in the physical order of bodies to the symbolic order of significant distinctions” (170)

“It transforms objectively classified practices, in which a class condition signifies itself (through taste), into classifying practices, that is, into a symbolic expression of class position, by perceiving them in their mutual relations and in terms of social classificatory schemes” (170)

“Through taste, an agent has what he likes because he likes what he has, that is, the properties actually given to him in the distributions and legitimately assigned to him in the classifications” (171)

HABITUS:

“both the generative principle of objectively classifiable judgments and the system of classification of these practices. It is the relationship between the two capacities which define the habitus, the capacity to produce classifiable practices and works, and the capacity to differentiate and appreciate these practices and products (taste), that the represented social world, i.e., the space of life-styles, is constituted” (165-166)

“The habitus is necessarily internalized and converted into a disposition that generates meaningful practices and meaning-giving perceptions; it is a general, transposable disposition which carries out a systematic, universal application–beyond the limits of what has been directly learnt–of the necessity inherent in the learning conditions” (166)

“The habitus is not only a structuring structure, which organizes practices and the perception of practices, but also a structured structure: the principle of division into logical classes which organizes the perception of the social world is itself the product of internalization of the division into social classes” (166)

Essentially, the concept of the habitus explains many of the Victorian responses to popular fiction and other popular media, and, as I’ve argued before, it explains the professionalization of many sensational detectives, including Robert Audley, Sherlock Holmes, and even Watson. In fact, I wonder if the Sherlock Holmes/Watson relationship could benefit from a more thorough analysis of how the habitus works in those texts. Something to think about for the future…

So, I have not read La Folie du Jour, so I’m going to leave that section of “The Law of Genre” alone and just focus on Derrida’s main points, which I think he lays out in the first part of this talk. The big flashy “wow!” moment for me was Derrida’s “axiomatic question,” where he asks, “can one identify a work of art, of whatever sort, but especially a work of discursive art, if it does not bear the mark of a genre, if it does not signal or mention it or make it remarkable in any way?” (211). This seems to me to be the question he was leading us toward when, at the opening of his lecture, he gave us three utterances: “Genres are not to be mixed. I will not mix genres. I repeat: genres are not to be mixed. I will not mix them” (202). He says that we could have read that first statement, “genres are not to be mixed” as fairly neutral–in other words, here’s a thing that shouldn’t happen, just like eggs whites and parsley are not to be mixed, for whatever reason. Or, we could have read that as a prescriptive command: “Hey you, don’t even think about mixing genres! They are not to be mixed!” Similarly, his second statement, “I will not mix them,” could have been read according to different genre conventions. Again, it could have been a fairly neutral statement: “personally, this is not something I’m going to do, if that’s okay with you.” Or, it could have been read as a promise, a submissive posture in response to the previous command: “Okay, sir, I promise, I won’t mix them, I promise!” The key here is that Derrida did not give us any cues with which to interpret these statements. He left us uncertain of what genre they belonged to. So, we presumably had trouble classifying them, making them mean something, and therefore figuring out what he was trying to say. So, eventually, he asks, can we identify a work of art that has no marker of genre?

So, spoiler alert: Derrida doesn’t particularly believe in things that seem to have clear borders, like genres. So he doesn’t really want to talk about how to put things into genres. Anybody could do that, and besides, there are so many terms, he says, that how could he ever presume to contain their proliferation? It’s impossible. For him the law of genre is “precisely a principle of contamination, a law of impurity, a parasitical economy” (206). This is fairly familiar territory. By now, thanks in part to Derrida, we’re pretty comfortable acknowledging that nothing is just part of a specific genre. For example, in my case of sensation fiction, there is no ontological category called “sensation fiction.” It’s a “parasitical economy” in which the Newgate novel, the Gothic novel, the cheap serial novel, the Silver Fork novel, and a thousand other things all intersect to make a new category. But Derrida does not care about my categories on this level. What he cares about is the “category” that allows (or doesn’t allow) “categories” to be a “category.” Can categories be categorized?

Here he goes: “As with the class itself, the principle of genre is unclassifiable, it tolls the knell of the knell, in other words of classicum, of what permits one to call out orders and to order the manifold within a nomenclature” (208). So, if the death knell dies, who tolls the knell of the knell? If genre classifies members of a set, who classifies the set? As the principle of classification, genre can not itself be classified, so it exceeds itself, and the parts are bigger than the whole. So, part of the law of genre “is the law of abounding, of excess, the law of participation without membership, of contamination, etc., which I mentioned earlier” (210). Genre participates in sets by placing members into sets, but it is not itself a member of a set, so its principle is excess. At this point, Derrida realizes that he’s skirting the edge of genre-theory, and not really intending to go into genre-theory at all (interestingly, that word into treats genre as the container that Derrida characterizes it as being–he wants to talk about what makes the container contain).

Moving on, here’s the part that really fascinates me:

The trait common to these classes of classes is precisely the identifiable recurrence of a common trait by which one recognizes, or should recognize, a membership in a class. There should be a trait upon which one could rely in order to decide that a given textual event, a given “work,” corresponds to a given class (genre, type, mode, form, etc.). And there should be a code enabling one to decide questions of class-membership on the basis of this trait. (210-211)

Okay, so if we’re going to say “this thing is a calico cat,” it should a) be a cat and b) have calico markings. That may have been a bad example, but the point I was trying to make is that the “mark” is a really important word for Derrida, and thinking of animal marking reminds me of that. He goes on about the mark:

…if one is bent on classifying, one should consult a set of identifiable and codifiable traits to determine whether this or that, such a thing or such an event belongs to this set or that class. This may seem trivial. Such a distinctive trait qua mark is however always a priori remarkable. It is always possible that a set–I have compelling reasons for calling this a text, whether it be written or oral–re-marks on this distinctive trait within itself. (211)

First of all, the “trait” that identifies something as “Thing X” is a “mark.” Okay. And we can deduce that marks are remarkable, in the sense that they should be visible enough for us to remark upon. So, a set, or a text, in its very essence, re-marks on its own mark. In other words, it makes its mark visible (is this like the Foucauldian idea of compulsory visibility?), but it also comments upon its own mark. It not only shows its mark, but it says, “hey, look, here’s my mark!” I’m not sure if I’m getting this quite right, but as I’m writing it, it really does remind me of Foucault… (I guess it would be too meta if I tried to “classify” them as both being deconstructionists…).

Derrida uses an example to explain his meaning above a bit more clearly:

A defense speech or newspaper editorial can indicate by means of a mark, even if it is not explicitly designated as such, “Viola! I belong, as anyone may remark, to the type of text called a defense speech or an article of the genre newspaper editorial.” (211)

What interests Derrida, he says, “is that this re-mark–ever possible for every text, for every corpus of traces–is absolutely necessary for and constitutive of what we call art, poetry or literature” (211). Literature needs the re-mark, and the re-mark is what makes literature literature. Is that because literature is inherently self-aware? Is it ALL meta?

Now it gets crazier:

…consider this paradox, consider the irony (which is irreducible to a consciousness or an attitude): this supplementary and distinctive trait, a mark of belonging or inclusion, does not properly pertain to any genre or class. The re-mark of belonging does not belong. It belongs without belonging, and the “without” (or the suffix “-less”) which relates belonging to non-belonging appears only in the timeless time of the blink of an eye. (212)

Said again, another way:

I submit for your consideration the following hypothesis: a text cannot belong to no genre, it cannot be without or less a genre. Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text; there is always a genre and genres, yet such participation never amounts to belonging. And not because of an abundant overflowing or a free, anarchic and unclassifiable productivity, but because of the trait of participation itself, because of the effect of the code and of the generic mark. Making genre its mark, a text demarcates itself. If remarks of belonging belong without belonging, participate without belonging, then genre-designations cannot be simply part of the corpus. (212)

So, each text has a mark, and that mark marks the text’s genre–which is the thing that makes a text a text. But the mark itself does not belong to the genre, and is only supplementary to the text itself (even though it’s also constitutive). Derrida explains it with the example of novels that announce on their cover that they are novels. For example, I just read a novel (for fun) called The Shoemaker’s Wife, and on the cover, right under the title, it says “A Novel”–just in case I couldn’t tell that it was a novel. This paratextual element–“A Novel”–is a mark. It marks the text as belonging to a genre–“the novel.” It makes the text announce, “Hello! I’m a novel!” However, the mark “A Novel” is not part of the novel. So genre-designations do not themselves belong to the genres they designate. The word or concept “novel” does not belong–along with Middlemarch and Vanity Fair–to the category it signifies. It gets complicated for me, at this point. Since the classificatory principle is itself NOT part of a class, then the thing that makes inclusion possible is itself excluded. The class, therefore, cannot be closed.

Here’s Derrida again:

This axiom of non-closure or non-fulfillment enfolds within itself the condition for the possibility and the impossibility of taxonomy. This inclusion and this exclusion do not remain exterior to one another; they do not exclude each other. They are neither one nor two. They form what I shall call the genre-clause, a clause stating at once the juridical utterance, the precedent-making designation and the law-text, but also the closure, the closing that excludes itself from what it includes (one could speak of a floodgate […] of genre). The clause or floodgate of genre declasses what it allows to be classed. It tolls the knell of genealogy or of genericity, which it however also brings forth to the light of day. Putting to death the very thing that it engenders, it cuts a strange figure; a formless form, it remains nearly invisible, it neither sees the day nor brings itself to light. Without it, neither genre nor literature come to light, but as soon as there is this blinking of an eye, this clause or this floodgate of genre, at the very moment that a genre or a literature is broached, at that very moment, degenerescence has begun, the end begins. (212-213)

Okay, so the genre-clause is the thing I just talked about, I think. It’s the idea that the genre-designation does not belong to the genre that it demarcates, so it is excluded from the principle of inclusion that it makes possible. However, these two things–the genre and the genre-designation–don’t necessarily exclude each other (deconstruction is happening right now, I think). In other words, just because the genre-designator is excluded from the inclusion it constitutes doesn’t mean that genre then doesn’t exist. The genre-designator has made a juridical utterance (“this thing is a novel, that thing isn’t”), but the inevitable constructedness of that utterance doesn’t negate its existence. A thing called “novel” still does exist, even though it’s always already contaminated. However, the genre-clause is about non-closure (if genre doesn’t include the thing that makes it a genre, then it can never be a closed set). Therefore, it “declasses what it allows to be classed” (213). The word “novel” makes it possible to class things as “novels,” but the exclusion of the word “novel” from its own category means that the things in that category can rush through the floodgates of the class called “novel.” So the genre-clause “tolls the knell of genealogy or of genericity” (213), but it also sheds light on genre because it brings these questions to our attention–it causes us to “re-mark” upon the members of the set. So, genre-designators bring members of a set to life: the concept “novel” means that we can see a certain body of texts as “novels.” But, in its inability to close the set and draw a complete line around “things that are novels,” it opens the floodgates (“well, is this thing a novel or not?”) and thereby kills the very thing it brought to life. So, literature cannot exist without genre, but the very moment that we notice the genre-clause or question a genre-designator (which we always do), that moment is the beginning of the end of genre.

I need to write an in-depth summary of David Kurnick’s argument in this book, but I find it relatively complex, so to start out, I’m going to write a summary in play form.

NANCY ARMSTRONG: (in chorus, with an entire tradition of theorists of the novel) The rise of the novel corresponds with the rise of privacy and interiority. Thus, we can see in 19th-century novels an intense focus on the individual and on the individual’s interior landscape. The novel is about interiority! Look at George Eliot! Henry James! And wow, check out James Joyce!

DAVID KURNICK: You’re forgetting that all of these famous novelists you’re talking about were failed playwrights.

NANCY ARMSTRONG, ET. AL: So what? Interiority doesn’t play well on the stage. Of course they failed as playwrights. It’s the reason they became so good at novel-writing.

DAVID KURNICK: Actually, the very form of theater is about collectivity. No matter how much interiority you want to project on stage, you have to realize that theater is a collaborative enterprise. It takes lots of actors working together, and an entire audience to come watch the play. This is the medium these novelists first chose as their preferred representational form. They wanted to escape interiority, and it shows in their subsequent novels.

EMILY ALLEN: (in chorus, with an emerging tradition of scholars who look at theatrical metaphors in novels) We understand you, David Kurnick. Nineteenth-century novels are all about the theater. Look at all the theater metaphors all over the place. They’re everywhere! Let’s all write entire books on theater metaphors in nineteenth-century novels!! Also, look how many duplicitous characters there are–it’s like they’re all playing a role. Meta-theatricality! Theatrical themes are everywhere! Yay!!

DAVID KURNICK: Sure…. Those are all awesome books you folks wrote. But I have a couple of problems. Why are we always equating duplicitous characters with some kind of theatricality? Why does duplicity = theatricality? That’s not really what I’m going for here. Theatricality, for me, = collectivity. The theatrical space is a collective, collaborative space.

DAVID KURNICK: Totally. All over the place. But that’s still not what I’m going to do with this book. I think that we’re doing a little too much of this “theater-as-metaphor” thing. Why is the theater *just* a metaphor for something bigger? Because we marginalize it, that’s why. But guess who didn’t marginalize it? George Eliot, Henry James, William Thackeray, and James Joyce. They all wanted to be playwrights. And it’s not just that their novels use the theater as “metaphors” for something–their novels literally marginalize the sense of interiority and individuality that novel-reading implies and gesture toward a collective theatrical space. Repeatedly. Seriously. Read my book. Therefore, I’m de-thematizing theater and reading these metafictional moments as authorial references to the plays that might have been. They are gestures toward the collective, not *just* metaphors.

“Novel Sensations of the 1860s” is chapter 7 of Patrick Brantlinger’s book The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. His main point in this chapter seems to be that the detective figure of sensation fiction diminishes the authority of the omniscient narrator of realist fiction. He makes some interesting points, and I particularly like how he responds to D.A. Miller’s contention that detective plots install a force of novelistic surveillance that resembles ideology: you can’t ever get outside of its reach. Following Foucault, Miller is obsessed with panoptic vision, so he sees the detective, and by extension, the novel as a whole, as a panoptic seer. Brantlinger points out that Miller’s argument doesn’t fully account for Bakhtin’s theory that the novel is always dialogic. Miller’s account does seem pretty monologic on the surface, but I need to investigate this on my own more fully, since I know that Bakhtin has no problem calling Tolstoy monologic, so I’m not sure he’d necessarily disagree with Milller…. But it’s an interesting point. Also, Brantlinger writes–based on Jameson’s claim that “the visual is essentially pornographic” (qtd. in Brantlinger 160)–that “surveillance, or the gaze of the detective-policeman, cannot be neatly disentangled from the pornographic gaze in any sensation novel” (160). Brantlinger references the pornographic gaze because sensation novels “operate obsessively, albeit regressively, to see, to render visible, what is unseen or hidden within ‘the secret theatre of home'” (160). So, Brantlinger poses the question: “Surveillance or pornography? […] Beyond the innocent though absolutist eye of the realist author, narrator, and reader, says the sensation novel, there is another, second way of seeing and therefore reading. But that second way of reading/seeing is neither self-evident nor safe” (162).

This is an interesting conversation between Brantlinger and Miller, and I think it relates specifically to my interest in the close-reading practices of sensation fiction–although I think Brantlinger pretty much covers everything I was interested in. But my thinking has taken some new directions since I formulated that interest, so that’s okay. Here’s how Brantlinger characterizes the detective-reader:

As if second-guessing the author, the detective reconstructs the fragmented text of the past–the buried story of the crime or crimes. As super-reader, moreover, the detective seems to mediate between the novelist and the anonymous, ever-increasing “outlying mass of average readers,” the “unknown public” that Wilkie Collins, for one, both viewed with trepidation and sought to entertain. (146)

And here’s the main claim:

The emergence of the detective seems to be linked to a weakening or defaillancy of narrative authority, which in turn may be linked to a paradigm shift in modes of observation. (146)

Here’s the part where I have some questions:

The detective serves as an expert observer or reader of clues, one who is able to read differently from the (mere) novel-reader. The latter is reduced to hankering after both thrills and facts, while the distinction between the two–thrills and facts–blurs: the ultimate thrill is the final revelation of the criminal truth, a revelation provided by the detective, who after reading the clues can narrate the final, coherent story of the crime and effect a restoration of order. In this way, sensation novels are always allegories of reading that, on one hand, install a new professionalism or expertise while, on the other, validating the contested concept of novel-reading as mere pleasure, mere entertainment. From now on, they suggest, only experts can do the serious business of reading the book of the world. But for ordinary readers, there are newspapers and sensation novels. (146-147)

Hmmm….. I agree with this, overall. But I think there’s more to say here. It’s mostly the use of the words “professionalism,” “expertise,” and “experts” that I think are under-theorized here. First of all, a major part of D.A. Miller’s argument is that detective novels engage in a disavowal of professional crime-solvers, like the police, in favor of their amateur supplements. This is part of what establishes the normativity of surveillance in these novels. Police presence = disruptive, abnormal. Robert Audley or Franklin Blake = normal (and normative). So, I’m not sure that sensation novels really do “install a new professionalism or expertise.” I think the entire point of characters like Robert Audley and Franklin Blake and Magdalen Vanstone is that they are unprofessional and amateur–not experts at all. However, I have argued in other papers that Robert Audley, specifically, does gain expertise over the course of Lady Audley’s Secret (and I think I’ve run across an article that argues much the same thing). However, the novel is, in that sense, a bildungsroman that charts his development and professionalization. Brantlinger partially acknowledges this point: “the detectives in [sensation novels], for example, are often not Auden’s ‘genius from outside,’ but a character or characters directly involved in the story” (157). This is part of my point about Robert Audley’s professionalization: he is only motivated to act as a detective because he’s profoundly inside and involved in the story. As a barrister, he could have been the “genius from outside” in a number of other stories–but only affective bonds can prompt him to act. But Brantlinger concludes this particular point by writing: “In sensation and later mystery-detective novels, however, just as the intractable problem of evil is reduced to a neatly soluble puzzle on a personal level, so the search for self-knowledge is short-circuited” (157). I’m not sure about this. I think that Robert Audley’s narrative is similar to a bildungsroman–I’m not saying it is a bildungsroman, but I think it capitalizes (literally) on that structure–so maybe the search for self-knowledge is short-circuited…. but maybe the search for self-knowledge in a lot of these narratives is similarly short-circuited. I don’t know–I’ll have to examine this some more. The point is that many sensational detectives only become professionalized through the process of solving the crime–and they reach the closure of self-knowledge in these texts precisely because they are solving mysteries intimately connected with their own identities. So, yes, they are expert readers, but only in the way anyone might be an expert reader of her own life. As readers of the book of reality, I think many of them are profoundly amateur, especially when compared to a real “expert” like Sherlock Holmes.

This is an illustration from the 11 April 1863 part issue of Lady Audley’s Secret entitled “Talboys Gazing at Lady Audley’s Picture.” Given my discussion of ekphrasis in Lady Audley’s Secret, this is an absolutely bizarre illustration. My conference paper already discusses some of the competing temporalities in the novel’s ekphrastic description of her portrait, but I haven’t really discussed this picture of a picture in a novel. Ekphrasis cubed? The level of meta- in this illustration is almost too much to handle. This is a picture of a picture of Lady Audley, being watched by George Talboys, who is being watched by Robert Audley, the entire scene of which is being looked at by…. me, at the moment… And the only thing I can’t really see in this picture is Lady Audley’s portrait–the illustration seems to refer me to the text it accompanies for a “view” of the portrait. So the illustration instructs me to go along with Robert Audley, and gaze at a gaze. George is clearly the focal point, the tip of the triangle constructed by my line of vision and Robert Audley’s. Or is Robert looking beyond George, at the portrait of Lady Audley? He’s conveniently hiding in the shadows, so we can’t tell. One of the points here, though, is that this is what ekphrasis does: it freezes the viewer, while the picture moves. This is a picture of frozen viewers, which nonetheless actively directs us back to the moving picture on the printed page. (And in an odd side note, the far right side of the illustration seems to contain one or two framed pictures that ARE oriented toward us–what’s up with that?)

As I’m revising my conference paper on ekphrasis in Lady Audley’s Secret, I’m trying to incorporate as many different visual depictions of her as possible. And I’m realizing that, given the prominence of her portrait in the novel, maybe any “portrait” of her can count as ekphrasis under the definition I’m using. So here she is pushing George Talboys into the well. This scene is not actually directly represented in the novel, but it’s the scene that all the adaptations (even H.J. Byron’s) revolve around. It’s a scene of intense movement and interaction between the two actors. We can see several different representations of movement in this woodcut: Lady Audley’s posture, for example, is inclined forward, back hunched, arms locked, hair flapping behind her. George Talboys is poised to fall into the well, arms raised, hat already fallen off. Even the crumbling rocks can be seen falling into the depths of the well. But here’s what’s weird. Lady Audley is inclined forward, as if she’s ABOUT to push George into the well. But George is already falling. The two figures are not touching–even their feet, which are almost touching, are not actually in contact. This is simultaneously a picture of Lady Audley ABOUT TO push George and a picture of Lady Audley HAVING PUSHED George. Two temporalities coexist in this woodcut, future and past–Lady Audley about to do something, and the thing already having been done. So, how should we read this? Perhaps this registers the frenetic pace of the adaptations–a pace that Henry Morely critiques in his journal when he mentions that too many things are happening all at once, on top of one another, losing the measured pace of the novelistic original. Maybe this is motion overlapping motion–our knowledge of the novel fills in the gap that the woodcut creates. Or does this lack of contact between Lady Audley and her victim diminish some of her agency in this act? Although the woodcut clearly portrays her intention to shove George, in actuality, it appears that he falls before she even touches him. This may seem like a minor point, but in a novel that already complicates her culpability in the attempted murder to such an exquisite degree, this illustration, perhaps, portrays her desperation more than her aggression. Either way, this odd sense of movement is complicated even more by the fact that it’s solidified in a woodcut–which refers us to the moving stage adaptation.

One of my biggest fears (which will absolutely happen) is that my exam committee will ask me about my methodology. There was a section on “method” in my prospectus, and I think it discussed affect theory, thing theory, theories of close reading, etc. The problem with that is that I still don’t know much about affect theory, and probably don’t know as much as I should about thing theory either.

But I do have a vision for how I want to be able to answer this question, so that’s something I actually can talk about. I want to be like Lynn Voskuil, Elaine Hadley, and David Kurnick. Their methodologies are graceful and rich. Lynn Voskuil uses the Victorian theory of “natural acting” as a lens through which to read her primary texts. Elaine Hadley reads a variety of texts and social events through the lends of what she calls the “melodramatic mode,” which is more than a simple genre, but is also a gestural language, a method of interaction, a method of political communication, etc. And David Kurnick writes that he wants to reverse engineer Henry James’s “scenic method” in order to account for the theatrical failures of major novelists.

Here’s what I admire: you can’t just pin these folks down to a school of thought. They don’t announce their theoretical labels with bumper-sticker tags like “deconstruction,” “Marxism,” or “feminism.” They’re more elegant and subtle, like the Victorians, hahaha. Seriously, though, these methodologies feel organic, like they’ve grown from the subject itself. That’s what I want. I want a methodology that feels like it came from my research topic. I guess that would make me a historicist, which I suppose is the over-arching methodology I’m admiring here.

So I’m going to say all that when they ask about my methodology. And I’m going to say that so far, the thing that I’m hanging onto is the “legitimate” vs. “illegitimate” theater. I haven’t seen anyone do for this what Elaine Hadley did for the melodramatic mode, so maybe I could do it? Maybe I can find a cache of reviews and articles and cultural instantiations of theatrical legitimacy and illegitimacy and can use that to build a theory that might account for how material objects function in sensation novels and their theatrical adaptations. I’m not sure that elegant methodologies are born this way, but my research so far suggests that this could work, so I’m going to pursue this for now.